Ain’t no lie, pop boy band NSYNC reunited at last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, giving the first award of the night, Best Pop Video, to Taylor Swift.
Taking the stage early on, NYSNC — Justin Timberlake, Lance Bass, Joey Fatone, JC Chasez, and Chris Kirkpatrick — were greeted with a resounding reception. On the mic, Chasez said, “Over 20 years ago we were just kids when we won Best Pop Video for ‘Bye, Bye, Bye,’…It was our first VMA and it meant the world to us.” NYSNC would win the award twice, taking home the Moonman the year after for, appropriately enough, “Pop”.
Lance Bass added, “A lot has changed over the past two decades but one thing remains constant, a creative, boundary-pushing video leaves a lasting mark for decades.” After naming the nominees, NYSNC announced Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” as that night’s winner; this is Swift’s second win in the category.
Upon accepting the award, Swift asked what most of the audience was thinking about NYSNC: What now? “I had your dolls…Are you doing something? What’s going to happen now? They’re going to do something and I need to know what it is. You’re pop personified and to receive this from your golden pop hands it’s too much.”
Considering what NSYNC (and Backstreet Boys, but we didn’t see them handing out anything to Ice Spice…) did for boy bands in the late ‘90s, it’s no wonder that Swift was so blown away by their presence. With record sales around 70 million, several Grammy nominations and their own collection of MTV VMAs, NSYNC remains one of the most iconic bands of its kind. Following their 2007 breakup, the boys took their own routes, with the most successful member being Justin Timberlake, who has had a pretty consistent movie career since.
With or without NYSNC, Taylor Swift was the real winner at last night’s MTV VMAs, taking home nine awards out of 11 nominations. That makes her the second-biggest winner in any single night in the show’s history, behind only Peter Gabriel’s 10 back in 1987 (yes, the “Sledgehammer” video was that good). Meanwhile, Swift is setting records on the cinema front, as her upcoming concert film broke AMC’s pre-sale records set by Spider-Man: No Way Home.